Anonymous asked: Hi I was wondering if you could direct me to a tutorial or tell me how to reduce the polys/vertices of a mesh without it losing its shape? Thanks for reading this any help would be appreciated.

Hello anon! Sorry for the late reply, but there are a few ways to reduce a meshes polycount without losing shape. Though the easiest and fastest way is to use a lower LOD (level of detail) instead of the highest one available.

Sims3 and Sims4 meshes come in several LODs; most creators are pretty good about adding in lower poly LODS and they usually aren’t that much different from the high ones. Here’s a more in-depth tutorial under the cut. (I apologises if you already know how to mesh, but I thought this would be good for those are still new at meshing too D: )

(Warning! Image-heavy!)

First things first, download the original TS3/TS4 mesh in question you want to lower (in this case, I’m using Nightcrawler’s Danger Hair for TS4). Use the appropriate program to open and extract the meshes from the original package.

I tend to use S3PE for TS3 meshes and Sims 4 Studio for TS4, but you’re free to use whichever program you’re most comfortable with :)

In Studio 4, click on the “Meshes” tab and it’ll take you to the LODs; as you can see, there’s at least 4 of them to choose from (0 being the highest detail and 3 being the lowest). Generally you want to choose LOD 1 - as you can see it’s already half the count of LOD 0 (about 14k).

Once you click on “LOD 1″, click “Export Mesh” and save it to a work folder you can find easily, then name the file something you’ll remember and save. It might take a bit, but the folder should automatically open once the save is finish and the blender file will be available to edit (you don’t have blender, you can download it free here: http://blender.org/).

Open up the saved blender file; I know it’s looks daunting at first, but ignore the set up for the time being and focus on the list on the right-side. You’ll noticed there’s three meshes - two of those meshes are for hats only, so you may have to hide and un-hide (clicking on the little eyeball icon) to find the right mesh. Once you have, click on it to select it and the mesh will get this orange highlight on around it. This means the mesh is selected.

Once your mesh is selected, go to “File -> Export -> Wavefront (.obj)” so we can import it into milkshape.

You will be taken to this menu; find the work folder you’re using for this project and make sure “Selection Only” in the left bottom menu is checked. This ensures that only our selected mesh is exported and nothing else. Click Export Obj and close blender.

Next open up Milkshape, “File -> Import -> Wavefront OBJ…” and find the .obj mesh we just exported from blender.

The mesh will look all black when you first import it; you can use the “Smooth All” option under the “Face” menu (normally you don’t ever touch this option, but it’ll be alright in this case).

It may still look a little off because of the material map it was exported with. Just simply go to the “Materials” tab, click on the “DiffuseMap” and delete it. Then click on “New” to add a new map (if you’re replacing a mesh, extract the textures from that conversion package to use as reference).

…Well that doesn’t look right; that’s because mapping in TS4 is very long - which I’m not entirely sure why since only a tiny corner is ever used… hence why the textures aren’t sitting right. To fix this, open up the texture window (Window -> Texture Coordinate Editor) to bring up the UV map window.

As shown, the UV map is all scrunched up in the corner; select all the dots (they’ll turn white if unselected), then click on the “Scale” button, then left-click and hold and drag your mouse down and around till the mapping lines up with the textures.

Once you’re satisfied with the way it looks, close the texture window. Now to import the TS2 bones.

To import the Sims2 bones, go to “File -> Import -> Sims2 UniMesh Import”. You will get two messages like these:

Click “OK” for the first pop-up and then “Yes” for the second one, because we do want to include the bones for this (since OBJs don’t have any).

Look for the appropriate gender and age meshes you’re going to use (adult female) and import the “HairBald” (scalp) and “Face”, and depending on the length of the hair, “BodyNaked”. Since this is a short hair, I’ll only import the Hair and Face. (Extracted body meshes can be downloaded here)

You’ll have to resize and move the hair mesh around in order to fit it properly to the Sims2 head; use the “Move” button and “Scale” (at intervals of 0.01 either up or down; lower than 1.0 = shrinking; higher than 1.0 = enlarging).

Once you have the hair fitted to head, go to the “Joints” tab to assign it some bones. Since this is a short hair, I just simply assigned it to the “Head” joint (slightly more in-depth of bone basics can be found here).

Once all the bones are assigned, rename the hair mesh. If you’re converting a mesh yourself, name it to whatever the base mesh is (most cases, hair_alpha5, bangs_l3 and hairalpha5 are common ones).

If you’re replacing a mesh, be sure to name it exactly as the original converted mesh.

Once the mesh is renamed, click on “Comment” and add in the above text (make sure “ModelName:” matches the name of the mesh).

Once everything is done and done, you can export the mesh as TS2 mesh. Convert the hair to the other ages/gender (if available), then close milkshape and open up simPE.

If you’re making your own mesh, you can skip this part, but if you’re replacing a mesh - click on the “GMDC” in the Resource Tree, then click on one of the gmdc in the Resource List. In Plugin View, select the “Filename” and copy it; it’s important to do this to avoid breaking existing retextures already made for this mesh.

Once you’ve copied the filename, right-click on the gmdc line and click “Replace…”; this message will pop up:

Just click “Yes” and find the right age and gender mesh you’ve just exported from milkshape and click on it.

You’ll noticed the gmdc filename has now changed to whatever you’ve named your exported mesh file. Select the “Filename” again in the Plugin View and paste in the name you copied three steps back.

Then hit “Commit” and then “OK” and volia! Do this for the rest of the ages/genders and then save. Drop your newly edited mesh and some texture files into your “Downloads” folder, fire up bodyshop and check to make sure everything looks fine.

And there we go; we just shaved half the count of this hair without losing it’s shape or quality. Hope this helps anyone! >.<